Todayâs leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese About this EpisodeEpisode 77 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Nicholas Thompson discussing AI, humanity, social credit, as well as information bubbles. Nicholas Thompson is the editor in chief of WIRED magazine, contributing editor at CBS, co-founder of The Atavist and also worked at The New Yorker and authored a Cold War era biography. Visit www.VoicesinAI.com to listen to this one-hour podcast or read the full transcript. Transcript ExcerptByron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm, Iâm Byron Reese. Today my guest is Nicholas Thompson. He is the editor in chief of WIRED magazine. Heâs also a contributing editor at CBS which means youâve probably seen him on the air talking about tech stories and trends. He also co-founded The Atavist, a digital magazine publishing platform. Prior to being at WIRED he was a senior editor at The New Yorker and editor of NewYorker.com. He also published a book called The Hawk and the Dove, which is about the history of the Cold War. Welcome to the show Nicholas. Nicholas Thompson: Thanks Byron. How you doing? Iâm doing great. So⦠artificial intelligence, whatâs that all about? (Laughs) Itâs one of the most important things happening in technology right now. So do you think it really is intelligent, or is it just faking it? What is it like from your viewpoint? Is it actually smart or not? Oh, I think itâs definitely smart. I think that the premise of artificial intelligence, which if you define it as machines making independent decisions, is very smart right now and soon to get even smarter. Well it always sounds like Iâm just playing what they call semantic gymnastics or something. But does the machine actually make a decision, or is it just no more than your clock makes a decision to advance the minute hand one minute? The computer is as deterministic as that clock. It doesnât really decide anything it just is a giant clockwork isnât it? Right. I mean that gets you into about 19 layers of a really complicated discussion. I would say âyesâ in a way it is like a clock. But in other ways, machines are making decisions that are totally independent from the instructions or the data that was initially fed it, are finding patterns that the humans wonât see, and couldnât be coded in. So in that way it becomes quite different from a clock. Iâm intrigued by that. I mean the compass points to the north. It doesnât know which way north is. That would be giving it too much credit. But it does something that we canât do, called magnetic north. So how is that really is the compass intelligent by the way you see the world? Is the compass intelligent by the way I see the world? Well the compass is⦠I mean one of the issues here is that artificial intelligence uses two words that have very complicated meanings and their definition evolves as we learn more about artificial intelligence. And not only that, but the definition of artificial intelligence and the way itâs used changes constantly both as our technology evolves as it learns to do new things, and as it develops its brand value. So back to your initial question, âIs a compass that points to the north intelligent?â It is intelligent in the sense that itâs adding information to our world, but itâs not doing anything independent of the person who created it, who built the tools and who imagined what it would do. You build a compass you know that itâs going to point north, you put the pieces inside of it, [and] you know it will do that. Itâs not breaking outside of the box of the initial rules that were given to it and the premise of artificial intelligence is that it is breaking out of that box. So Iâd like to really understand that a little more. Like if I buy a NEST learning thermometer and over time Iâm like, âoh Iâm too hot, Iâm too cold, Iâm too cold,â and it âfigures it outâ but how is it breaking out of what it knows? Well what would be interesting about a NEST thermometer, (I donât know the details of how a NEST thermometer works, but) a NEST thermometer is looking at all the patterns of when you turn on your heat and when you donâtâ¦. If you program in a NEST thermometer and you say please make the house hotter between 6:00 in the morning and 10:00 oâclock at night, thatâs relatively simple. If you just install a NEST thermometer and then it watches you and follows your patterns and then reaches the same conclusion, itâs ended up at the same output, but itâs done it in a different way which is more intelligent right? Well thatâs really the question isnât it? The reason I dwell on these things is not to kind of count angels dancing on heads of pins. But to me this kind of speaks to the ultimate limit of what this technology can do. Like if it is just a giant clockwork, then you have to come to the question, âIs that what we are? Are we just a giant clockwork?â If weâre not and it is, then there are limits to what it can do. If we are and it is or weâre not and itâs not, then maybe someday it can do everything we can do. Do you think that someday it can do everything we can to do? Yes. I thought this might be where you were going and this is where it gets so interesting. And that was where in my initial answer I was starting to head in this direction, but my instinct is that we are like a giant clock, an extremely complex clock and a clock thatâs built on rules that we donât understand and wonât understand for a long time, and that is built on rules that defy the way we normally programmed rules into clocks and calculators, but that essentially we are reducible to some form of math, and with infinite wisdom we could reach that that there isnât a special spiritual unknowable element in the box⦠Let me pause right there. Letâs put a pin in that word âspiritualâ for a minute, but I want to draw attention to when I asked you if AI is just a clockwork, you said âNo itâs more than that,â and if I ask you if a humanâs a clockwork, you say âyeah I think so.â Well thatâs because I was taking your definition of clock, right? So I think what you said a minute ago is really where itâs at â which is: either we are clocks and the machines are clocks, or we are machines, we are clocks and theyâre not clocks, there are four possibilities there. And my instinct is that if weâre going to define it that way, Iâm going to define clocks in an incredibly broad sense meaning mathematical reasoning including mathematics we donât understand today, Iâll make the argument that both humans and machines youâre creating are clocks. If weâre thinking of clocks in a much narrower sense, which is just a set of simple instructions input/output, then machines can go beyond that and humans can go beyond that too. But no matter how we define the clocks, Iâm putting the humans and the machines in the same category. So I either agree depending on what your base definitions are that humans and machines both are category A or theyâre both not category A, that there isnât any fundamental difference between the humans and the machines. Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed { font-size: 1.4rem; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cropped-voices-background.jpg) black; background-position: center; background-size: cover; color: white; padding: 1rem 1.5rem; font-weight: 200; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed:last-of-type { margin-bottom: 0; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { margin-top: .25rem; display: block; background: url(https://voicesinai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/voices-in-ai-logo-light-768x264.png) center left no-repeat; background-size: contain; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 30%; text-indent: -9999rem; margin-bottom: 1.5rem } @media (min-width: 960px) { .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed .logo { width: 262px; height: 90px; float: left; margin-right: 1.5rem; margin-bottom: 0; padding-bottom: 0; } } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed a:visited { color: #FF6B00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back a:hover { color: #ff4f00; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links { margin-left: 0 !important; margin-right: 0 !important; margin-bottom: 0.25rem; } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:link, .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:visited { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.77); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links a:hover { background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.63); } .voice-in-ai-link-back-embed ul.go-alexa-briefing-subscribe-links .stitcher .stitcher-logo { display: inline; width: auto; fill: currentColor; height: 1em; margin-bottom: -.15em; }Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. via Tumblr Voices in AI â Episode 77: A Conversation with Nicholas Thompson
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